Israeli leaders offer home to French Jews who fear for their safety
In wake oflast week's attacks, Netanyahu says he will convene a committee to encourage immigration amid 'terrible anti-Semitism'
Israeli leaders said they would welcome with open arms French Jews who fear for their safety in the wake of attacks by Islamist extremists against the satirical newspaper and shoppers at a kosher supermarket in Paris last week.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his cabinet linked arms with French politicians on Sunday during a march in Paris to commemorate the 17 people killed in three days of bloodshed in France. Netanyahu said: "I wish to tell to all French and European Jews - Israel is your home."
His office said the families of the four French Jews slain in the hostage standoff at the kosher grocery in Paris on Friday asked that their bodies be flown to Israel for burial. The funerals have been tentatively scheduled for today. Netanyahu said he would convene a special committee to encourage Jewish immigration "from France and other countries in Europe that are suffering from terrible anti-Semitism".
Israeli leaders pressed their case that Europe has allowed a dangerous rise of anti-Semitism and that Jews, even in the most developed countries on the continent, face not only hostility but also outright attack. Israel routinely makes the case for Jewish immigration - providing a haven for Jews in distress is, after all, one of its founding principles. But in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, the pitch is being made in the blunt terms of survival.
Yair Lapid, Netanyahu's former finance minister and the head of a centrist party, said at a gathering in Israel: "Jews are being murdered because they're Jews, and intellectuals are being murdered because they're intellectuals. The Europeans are starting to understand that there can be no compromise with terror, racism and anti-Semitism."
Lapid said: "European Jewry must understand that there is just one place for Jews, and that is the state of Israel."
Naftali Bennett, Israel's economy minister and a hard-right politician, who marched in Paris on Sunday, wrote on his Facebook page that he heard repeatedly from Jews that "there's nothing left for us in France".
